Yes, but it's also been included in Windows for years before. It is NOTHING NEW. lol
The DRM is Vista has far far far more effect on the system than you give it credit for. The fact that Nvidia and ATI are having constant issues with writing GFX drivers that work well on the system shows this. They can't even debug their code or the security tilt bits fire and reboot the GFX system. That simple fact alone shows what a messed up state Vista is. The companies that forced this DRM on Microsoft do not even trust the makers of GFX cards even to let them do their job...... Nice
EVERY part of the core system is bloated in this way so all the "trusted computing" systems can detect is a "hack" is taking place so it can take action. BTW: for hack read someone is trying to crack the DRM as it has beeen shown that Vista appears to suffer the same security holes as every other windows OS so far. The only people the new security stuff has effected is people that make security software, not the hackers.
The security world is not "Are you sure? impressed with "Are you sure? Vista's security. Companies are banning is being rolled because its not stable, It does not play well in a network or with network file management and it's a resource hog.
The funny part is that all the DRM that ws layered on every part of the system, even down to encryption over the system bus, is for nothing because all the HD content is on P2P already with all protection stripped.
The only hope is that the Media companies end the DRM madness soon. We can then get an OS that cares more about being an OS than it does about DRM protection for a handful of companies. If you are happy with Vista then fine. Just don't cry when DRM gets worse and worse so you find it hard to use your content. YOU, along with every other Vista user are saying DRM is ok, same as with everyone that buys DRM protected goods or music from iTunes. Stop buying DRM infected goods and they will be forced to stop selling DRM infected goods.
then why did it take most of the world to wait well after SP2 was released for XP for them to roll over the system to XP?
yes Vista has many bugs in it.. but eventually it will be the best OS once all the bugs have been worked out.. XP didnt come good till SP2, DRM has a good possibility to stick around.. they will find more inefficient ways to implement this where it seems it aint around at all.
that is the main reason why im waitin a year or so like i did with XP before is started using it.. just remember XP used to be a shit OS due to its instability and shit security.. now its one of the better OS's out there
My god man. The DRM in Vista is ONLY there in case you want to play back HDCP encrypted content. If you don't, then don't. It won't affect you in any way. No-one's forcing you to do anything. Same goes for the Trusted Platform Module support. If you don't want it, don't use it. These are features for those who want them.
As for blaming ME for DRM, I'm flattered, but as an avid Ubuntu user, and heavy user of open formats like FLAC and OGG Vorbis, I just don't see what I have done to promote DRM. The only reason why I tried to defend Vista here is because people letting their ignorance run wild annoy me. Yes, Vista has it's faults, but it's not that bad. In most cases there are very good reasons for it being the way it is. At least try to be objective when looking at it. It'll do wonders for your blood pressure.
EDIT: As for the prefetch mechanism in Windows I am aware that it has had that for a long time. The difference in Vista though is that it is far more agressive than before. As I said XP will always try to keep a certain amount of memory unused in case it's needed later. Vista is almost the exact opposite as it tries to cache as much as it can fit into memory. This works out very nicely if it's cached the right files, but of course if it didn't it will, like Kegetys pointed out, hurt performance wise. Anyway. How well Superfetch works is irrelevant. My point was that this is what Vista is doing with all that memory. It's not (all) down to bloat.
Actually no, while it might only be there for HD the code required to deal with it runs through EVERY part of the system. It touches the GFX drivers, the sound system, even includes encryption over the system bus.
Every part of the system has to be coded to handle "tilt bits" which must be set whenever ANYTHING in the system is not normal, including power spikes etc. This is part of the trusted computing platform that everything hangs on.
The signal path for HD content is from drive through to the HDMI connection so it touches EVERY part of the OS, like it or not. This means there a knock on effect through every part of the OS as every driver has to have DRM code.
Even the DX10 cards are built from the ground up to include DRM in the hardware layer. It is not possible for example for Nvidia and ATI to write true unified drivers any more with DX10 due to the DRM systems, so again the DRM effects users when they do not use it. Both GFX companies have publicly bitched about the extra workload that the DRM places on them in terms of hardware and software.
Then you get to the sound system and all the nice hardware processing that was part of the old sound cards can't be used in Vista as it does not support them any more due to DRM triggered changes in the Windows sound system.
Sorry assumed you were a Vista user the way you defend it.
I know they tried to do a lot with Vista, its just that after 5 years you would have thought it would have come to more than a DRM infected version of XP that when you REALLY look only gives a new skin to the windows with a bit of transparency thrown in. All the interesting things like WinFS, that would have made Vista worth a look have fallen by the roadside. Even .NET3 parts have been back ported to XP so it really does not offer much.
Funny you say that, I don't like all the extra rubbish in SP2 so I'm still running SP1 here.
I'd switch back to 2000 in an instant if it was more compatible, the last (only?) Microsoft OS I've genuinely liked.
+1 although im running sp2 for all the hotfixes it includes which would otherwise be a pain to install
maybe i should reinstall 2k ... probably works fine on my new pc
From personal experiance, Vista is a load of BS. My friend couldent even use his new GFX card with it because Vista thinks his DVI connector is, get this! "unsecure". It's a god damn monitor port for god's sake! of course it's not going to be secure, it doesn't have to be!
Vista has a fue good features that I thaught would have been nice, but after using it. It's slow and not worth the resources it takes to display the flashy GUI.
Whoop-di-dy-do! I can use my flash cards as ram!
Fat lot of good that does if you cant see whats on the screen because vista thinks your monitor port is unsecure!
He wen't back to XP after that. and I never bothered to get Vista in the first place, since it crashed on me several times in the store. (all I did was click that fancy round start button and BAM!)
The VIsta computer is my everyday GIGABYTE-GSR, which has a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 Prescott HT, 1 GB of Dual Channel DDR400 and a GeForce 7600GS AGP card. A 100 GB WD Caviar IDE for XP and a 250 GB WD Caviar SE SATA for Vista.
OK, first, Vista uses 400 MB of RAM just sitting there looking pretty after the install. Tack on another 35 MB of security software, and it goes up to 435. This leaves just 565 MB of memory. Compare that to XP which uses 250 MB with Service Pack 2, 285 with security software, leaving you with 715 MB of memory, or 2000 which uses 155 MB loaded, leaving you with 845 MB to play with.
I played an MMORPG which worked fine with XP using the SAME system (this is before and after Vista) but in Vista was pulling stupid heavy lag because the hard drive was now thrashing hard! I looked at the sidebar and saw the culprit: The memory gauge was pegged on 100%! In XP's Desktop Sidebar (I downloaded it), the memory reading never pegged 100% with this game. Task manager confirmed my suspicions.
That didn't stop there.
A Star Wars game I acquired at a LAN party requires monsterous system specs to play smoothly. The loading times between XP and Vista were insane. XP was twice faster loading up the game despite having the slower hard drive. And here's the kicker: The hard drive XP was on ran off the ATA100 and pulled a sickly 15 MB/sec whereas the Vista HD was on the SATA pulling 55 MB/sec. I would be waiting up to 2 minutes for the level to load in Vista, whereas XP would only take less than one minute.
Then, it got worse.
Those Hard Drive readings I got were from PC Pitstop, which can do a simple speed benchmark of your system, a dyno run of sorts. Wondering how Vista could be so SLOW on the SATA, I benched a week later from the initial install to find out that my 55 MB/sec super fast drive was now crawling at 15 MB/sec. HOW?! The SATA was not remapped or anything in the BIOS, so t could not be that! I did a defrag, which took a whole DAY, and it still was super slow.
So, in desperation, I yanked out the 160 GB hard drive out of my external enclosure, burnt a stack of DVDs for all the data, and installed 2000. While it was trugging along at 15 MB/sec on the IDE channel, I enabled the SATA after the install to bench it again, and guess what?! The SATA drive pulled 55 MB/sec under 2000! That and all the games went COPY over to the 2000 drive where they happily played along at faster speeds despite a slower hard drive.
Are you going to question my judgement now?
Also, to the person saying something about SLI, I KNOW. I said the CPU will hold back the performance. The point is to get the CPU to crunch the numbers faster so the graphics system (SLI'ed GPUs) can run wild and pull insane FPS.
Also, to the person saying something about dual cores not helping, they do, by a small factor. The nVidia driver can run in threaded mode apart from the app that is using the nVidia Driver. While this poses a stability problem for some games, it allows the nVidia Driver to run on a different core, thereby taking up to 20% overhead off of the core the game is running on. Overhead increases dramatically with SLI mode. And yes, I get up to 15% system overhead that is directed onto the other core. I had task manager running along the game in windowed mode, I know what I am talking about.
The point about performance is the small things. They stack up to a noticeable improvement when they are all done together.
And yes, I did put minimum sleep to 1ms. If it were turned up, the CPU use would go down.
BTW I have never asked for LFS to be completely rewritten just to appease 5 people that actually will use it. I would just like to see if compiling the game to run 64-bit native would yield a performance boost or not. Someone mentioned something about the 64-bit CPU being able to crunch numbers faster. Well, doesn't LFS do a truckload of physics calculations? Just a thought.
You don't even have enough memory in your machine to reach the addressing limits of 32bit systems. 64bit will not do what you want, just because the number 64 is bigger than 32 does not mean it runs faster.
Here are a few xp64 related benchmarks on games people have run
lfs is a physics driven game though and theres a possibility parts of the core code runs with doubles which will benefit a lot from a 64 bit compilation
and if it doesnt you could make the physics more accurate "for free"
Not really. If the 64bit and 32bit did not calculate out EXACTLY the same for EVERY piece of maths you will have an incompatible version of LFS for the 64bit version so you will not be able to race people using the 32bit client.
If 64bit was more accurate it means different values would be produced. It is impossible to have more accurate yet produce the same results. If you produced the same results it can't be more accurate
Sorry, been one of those days. At the start of a complete system re-write moving from VB to C# so in a very strange "black and white and logical" head space.
yes of couse but that wasnt my trail of though
the idea was something like this:
- if lfs is currently using doubles for its calculations the physics will stay exactly the same on a 64 bit compile but run significantly faster (at least the bits dealing with doubles
- if lfs is currently using floats changing all of them to doubles will make the physics more accurate ... naturally it will slow the game down for anybody whos using a 32 bit system but will come with (next to) no impact on performance for 64 bit systems (which will be the vast majority of the userbase by in a years or 2 years time)
TBH, I doubt floats are used that much as they are only 7 decimal places of precision while a double give 15-16 places depending on the actual value being held. The "cost" of a double is not too much higher than a float the extra resolution makes them worth while for the sort of maths being carried out here.
7 dp of resolution can be quiet small and restrictive depending on how the values are used and scaled in the game maths.
hm i couldnt find anything good on float vs doubles but it seems like the perfomance hit from using float is negligible if at all existant
id still claim that fpos on doubles should benefit the most from a 64bit compile though
Time to open this can of worms again, but CryTek (developers of FarCry and Crysis) are claiming they will have a 64-bit version of Crysis, that should improve performance by 15-17% per thread over 32-bit.
15% of that performance prob comes from the extra memory addresses. Some people might not know, but 4Gb of address space does not mean you can use 4gb of ram. some of that goes to that GPU so if you have a 8800GTX with 768 ram and 4gbs of ram installed only 3.2Gb is going to show up in windows, even though u have 4 installed. also address space is also taking up for pci cards as well eg sound card.
hes wrong though ... only under vista youll find the video memory mapped into a uniform address space on all other systems the vram has nothing to do with the 4 gigs of address space and isaddressed differently if im not completely mistaken
the implications have been discussed on anandtech at length
It's funny nobody mentions the extra registers that 64 bit cpu's have, because reducing the amount of load's and store's between the registers and ram is what imo gives it it's boost (or i've been taught wrong at school).
I would actually like to see a 64 bit version for lfs because the game is pretty cpu dependant, but I don't know if it would be a simple recompile or that some code needs to be rewritten for that.
Step one, get FRAPS.
Step two, get LFS System Benchmark
Step three, make an nfo file of your system.
Step four, run FRAPS and the LFS Benchmark.
Step five, post back your nfo, and your Benchmark results.
FYI, 512KB of L2 really is not enough now days, 1MB of more is req'ed.
While I'm at it, upshots of 64bit cpus include (but are not limited to).
Larger Registers. (Triple the amount of 32bit Registers [if my memory serves me correct] 64bit registers can be split in two to make two 32bit registers.)
More Addressable Memory Space (RAM).
More Addressable System Space (CPU, BIOS, NB, SB, Video Card).
Higher Precision Calculations.
Upshots of multi-core.
Much more stable system [in most cases]. (Something Hangs, it does not take up both cores.)
Concurrent Parallel Processing of Threads (Where available).
Up to a 99% speed increase per core (One of the core stills needs to tell the other cores what to do).
I think you are wrong, good sir. Memory is memory, and it has to be addressed by the system so that the system can use it. Correct me if I am wrong, but the CPU can also write to the Video cards memory in a direct manner (without having to ask the GPU). All memory has to be addressed, like the BIOSes memory, the CPU's registers, the CPU's cache, the north and south bridge, and the system RAM along with the registers of the GPU (including it's cache) and the ram on the video card.
Well, there is your first problem.
Dwindling, DWINDLING! How is ignorance? I hear it's bliss.
64bit users is only going to go up. It is the future of computers, while it might not be main stream yet, it is going to be.
Multi-core is also going to be very much an issue for all programmers out there, what with pretty much all new computers coming with mutli-core technology, and let's not forget INTeLs Hyper-Theading that's been around for like a billion years now.
(As to why this part of the post was hostile, it was maily due to the fact that he told another member to STFU, not nice. I don't play well with people who are not nice.)
assumed you were a Vista user the way you defend it.